Reader: With Grist Brewing, Highlands Ranch enters the '90s!

The southern suburbs were clearly thirsty for craft beer when Grist Brewing opened earlier this month in Highlands Ranch. Founded by organic chemist Rob Kevwitch, Grist is the first independently-owned craft brewery in Highlands Ranch -- and the first in a wave of brewery openings scheduled over the next few months in Centennial, Littleton and Parker as well as the Ranch. Since Denver is already awash in craft beer, don't suburb-dwellers deserve good brews, too?

But that beer comes with a price: major mockery of the brewery's home town.

Says Lance:

Welcome to the '90s, Highlands Ranch!!!!

Says Charlie Whiskey:

Cool, so the local drunks there are dudes who sit on their barstools and ramble on about how much of a bigshot they are in their cul-de-sac? AWESOME!

Will craft-beer spots work in the suburbs? Where would you like to see an independent craft-beermaker open up shop? Post your suggestions below. And for many more comments, as well as great pictures of Grist, see our grand-opening post.

Patricia Calhoun co-founded Westword, Denver’s News and Arts weekly, in 1977; she’s been the editor there ever since. She’s a regular on the weekly Colorado Public Television roundtable Colorado Inside Out, the former president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies -- a post that got her an unexpected interview with former President Bill Clinton in front of a thousand people (while she was in flip-flops) -- and played a real journalist in John Sayles’s Silver City.